Menu

Interview meme

• A meme snagged from kitzune:
→ Comment with “Come at me, bro”
→ I’ll respond by asking you five questions, so I can get to know you better.
→ Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
→ Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

1) What is one of the funniest moments you can remember from a D&D (or similar role-playing game) session?
Oh wow, I’m not even sure. There are tons of those “no shit, there I was”-stories in the RPGs I’ve played. And most need so much context that it’s almost impossible to convey why it was such a funny moment. Sometimes, it’s how an odd die roll derails an otherwise tense situation, or when a player does something against the character that they have spent a whole campaign building up — if you don’t have that context, you just don’t “get” why it’s so funny while the people that were there had to spend a few minutes to recover from their laughter.
There’s this meme in RPG circles that you don’t start telling people about your character if you don’t play together, because it’s just a lot of context-information, and while you think your character is the coolest ever, it’s just not interesting to other people. I think “funniest moments” are like that too.

2) What’s your favorite fruit?
They’re called mineola here in the Netherlands, tangelo elsewhere. So juicy and sour-sweet!
Close second is persimmon, or kaki as they’re called here (and in Japan). Sweet and soft taste.

3) Describe your perfect date.
Non-serious answer:
Serious answer:
Hmm, I haven’t “dated” as such for so long… Probably going somewhere nice for a walk: a beach or a forest. Not too far, just a calm stroll so you can get some decent chatting in. Then rest up for a bit and have a good dinner at a good restaurant with some creative dishes.

4) If you could visit anywhere in the world for about a week, where would you want to go?
Tokyo is an amazing place to visit for a week: there’s so much going on there that you wouldn’t get bored for a week — possibly even longer.

5) If you were tasked with introducing a complete newbie to anime, which three tv shows would you recommend?
That’s a good question. I prefer to do “personalised recommendations” and always start by asking what this person enjoys in other media: no matter how good the mecha anime is, if this person mostly enjoys fantasy, it will fall flat. But since we’re talking about someone who is a completely blank slate, I’ll just give three general recommendations and explain why. I will stay away from the typical ‘shounen’ series, because I don’t enjoy them — even though they are hugely popular. So if you ask someone else, you’d undoubtedly get stuff like One Piece, Dragonball Z or Naruto in there…
(I keep a running list of series we’ve watched, and we assign a 1 to 10 score. You can find the list, sorted by score, here.)

Mushishi – ‘moody’, magic-realism with lots of atmosphere and slow-moving scenes. It shows how anime can be used to tell really interesting stories. It really is a perfect series.

RahXephon – Sort-of mecha series with a grand, mysterious plot. It shows how anime can be used to tell epic, fantastical stories.

Nichijou – Funniest comedy series ever. The way things are set up in the episodes, but also through multiple episodes is superb. It shows how anime can be freed from all kinds of conventions to do something truly great.

But the more I think about it, the more I think there should also be other series in there — but it’s also a matter of personal taste, like with all media recommendations.